Posts tagged with "Hudson Yards":

Icelandic pop pioneer Björk will be world premiering a new concert at The Shed, the cultural institution set to open in Manhattan's Hudson Yards in 2019. Titled Cornucopia, the show will see Björk performing with a seven-piece female Icelandic flute ensemble and other supporting musicians in The McCourt, the forthcoming venue's largest space.
"this winter i will prepare my most elaborate stage concert yet, where the acoustic and digital will shake hands, encouraged by a bespoke team of collaborators,” said the singer in a statement.
Björk will work with Tony-winning director John Tiffany who will direct the show, Dutch fashion designer Iris Van Herpen on costumes, and Chloe Lamford on set design, along with media artist Tobias Gremmler and frequent Björk collaborator James Merry.
Specific dates have not yet been announced for Cornucopia, and tickets are not yet available. There is no word as to whether the show will include new music, or will feature tracks from her extensive back catalog. Björk's most recent album, Utopia, was released in 2017 and imagined an emotional paradise in the wake of her breakup of her longtime partner the artist Matthew Barney. Björk has not yet toured with that album in the U.S. Utopia also used a backing flute ensemble, suggesting that the new concert will work with that material.
The Shed is a massive new space designed by DS+R and Rockwell Group that features a retractable ETFE-paneled facade mounted on massive wheels. It is one of the centerpieces of the Hudson Yards development built over train yards overlooking the Hudson River.
Alex Poots was hired as the founding artistic director and CEO of the new artspace after stints at the Park Avenue Armory and the Manchester International Festival. The Shed is scheduled to open in the spring of 2019, with the Björk show presumably being one of the inaugural performances.

Finally, we have a visual of what the rest of the rail yards at New York City's Hudson Yards will become. CityRealty reported that new renderings have been revealed of the expansion of the 17-million-square-foot megaproject, detailing how the development will take over the entirety of the Amtrak railyard.Phase two of construction on Hudson Yards’ intertwining parkland will add winding stone paths, a lush open lawn, food kiosks, and a bright children’s playground overlooking the Hudson River next to the High Line. Manhattan-based landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz (NBWLA)—which also designed the currently-under-construction Public Square and Gardens at Hudson Yards—will bring more, much-needed green space to the West Side enclave that’s recently gotten flack for its record-breaking price tag. The expansion also includes the final build-out of Michael Van Valkenburgh (MVVA)’s Hudson Boulevard Park that runs directly through the site from 33rd to 36th Streets. Once complete, the extension will bring it up to 39th Street. MVVA finished the first phase of the elongated greenway in 2015, which included the MTA’s 7 train extension in what’s known as Eastern Yards. Together with the boulevard and far West Side parkland, the long-awaited landscape at Hudson Yards will cover a total of 12 acres.NBWLA’s renderings show that the park will sit on the same level as the adjacent High Line, meaning the team will likely use the same engineering to construct a ventilation cover for the rail yard below and a deck to support the landscape. Officials say groundbreaking on the second phase of parkland at Hudson Yards will begin in late 2020 and is slated to open in winter 2023.Once complete, Hudson Yards Development Corporation, which is building out the plan, will transfer care of the parkland over to the city’s parks and transportation departments.

An extension to the park running through New York City's Hudson Yards development could become the most expensive park per acre in the history of the city. As Crain'sreported last week, the new section of Hudson Park and Boulevard will cost $125 million per acre. The extension will cost $374 million total. For reference, the city's next most expensive parks per acre were Bushwick Inlet Park at $54 million per acre, and the High Line at $36 million per acre.
The sky-high cost is apparently a result of real estate prices. The city has to buy all of the property from private owners, and it will have to cover sunken railroad tracks that run under the site.
The park lies between 10th and 11th Avenues and currently runs between 33rd and 36th Streets. The extension will go up to 39th Street.
Hudson Yards, which calls itself "the largest private real estate development in the history of the United States," covers 14 acres of Manhattan's West Side, covering former rail yards with almost 20 million square feet of retail, office, and residential space. The first phase of the development, which includes towers designed by DS+R, SOM, and KPF around a public sculpture by Heatherwick Studio, is nearing completion, and some of the spaces are already occupied. Residences in the development are largely for the super-affluent, and the neighborhood more generally is booming with construction catering to the city's wealthiest.
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates designed the park spaces, which extend northward through the center of the development's site. The relatively-straightforward design creates a central "greenway and boulevard" with a mix of paving, fountains, and plantings.
The park's extremely high cost has come under criticism as the rest of the city's park system has struggled to find funding for basic maintenance and operations. A report earlier this year painted a dire picture of the NYC Parks Department being underfunded and overburdened. The city's Community Parks Initiative, an effort to upgrade 65 parks across the city, has a budget of $318 million, less than what the city will spend on the Hudson Boulevard Park expansion.

Hundreds of construction workers crowded New York City's Park Avenue on Wednesday during rush hour in protestagainst Related Companies, developer of New York’s $20-billion Hudson Yards project. Hudson Yards is the massive real estate development on Manhattan's West Side that has towers by DS+R, SOM, and KPF along with DS+R and Rockwell Group's The Shed and Heatherwick Studio's Vessel. As part of the #CountMeIn movement to fight against open shop or non-unionized workplaces, 37 people were arrested at the scene according to Crain’s New York.The demonstration shut down the street at 345 Park Avenue, an office tower home to the headquarters of the National Football League where billionaire Miami Dolphins owner and Related chairman Stephen Ross works. Protestors called for Ross’s resignation from his new seat on the NFL’s social justice committee, which seeks to appease the professional players who oppose the league’s ban on kneeling during the national anthem. Crain’s said that the #CountMeIn protestors—who claim Ross is anti-union—wore teal T-shirts designed to mimic a Dolphins’ jersey that read “Step Down Steve” in orange lettering.

Construction workers are risking arrest today to stand up against unscrupulous, anti-union developers like @RelatedCos who place workers in unsafe conditions and deny them the respect they deserve on the job. #CountMeInpic.twitter.com/K9161BzwfU

The large-scale gathering is the biggest public display so far from organized labor groups in their ongoing dispute with Related, which wants to use nonunion labor for the second phase of construction at Hudson Yards. Crain’s reported the company filed a $100-million lawsuit earlier this year to undercut the efforts of the city’s strongest labor organizer, the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, in negotiating new union opportunities for the construction of the upcoming towers at Hudson Yards. The real estate and construction powerhouse believes union workers abused their hours on site and caused inflation over the last five years while working on the first phase. Crain’s wrote that Wednesday’s protests were seen by many as a personal attack on Ross and that he’s discriminating against laborers by condoning racism, sexism, and union-busting. Targeting Ross’s new position on the NFL’s social justice committee is an avenue for the union groups to bring greater awareness to this ongoing fight.

Rafael Viñoly Architects recently released new renderings for the renovation of 787 Eleventh Avenue. The renderings show how the large industrial building is revamped into an array of car showroom and office spaces for Packard Motor Company. The renovation of the historic building along 11th and 12th Avenues in Hell’s Kitchen was originally announced in 2016.
Located in proximity to the iconic Via 57 West, Mercedes House and Hudson Yards, the Rafael Viñoly-designed edifice will be a new addition to the already crowded architectural scene. It will add to Manhattan Midtown’s westward expansion to the Hudson River.
The existing eight-story Art Deco building was originally designed by the late Albert Kahn in 1927. Viñoly’s renovation adds two upper floors to the building. The new ninth and tenth floors recedes from the periphery of the building to produce an uninterrupted private outdoor green terrace.The lower floors will remain a car showroom and contain service areas, while the upper floors will become commercial office space to accommodate the expanded workforce.
Viñoly envisions a work environment with upgrades such as a 12,000-square-foot green roof deck. The roof was originally allocated as employee parking, which is now moved to the basement.
In the original structure, widely spaced columns support one-acre-large floor slabs, which permit open office layouts. To further enlarge the volumes of spaces, the seventh floor slab is removed to create a double-height office.
Other features of the new design include the renovation of the facade, the ground-floor entrance, the building lobby and modern infrastructure. The architects will install floor to ceiling windows as large as ten feet by ten feet to allow for better lighting into the offices, as well as expanded views to the city and the river.

In the run-up to the opening of The Shed, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Rockwell Group’s new arts center in the Hudson Yards development, a 2-week program called A Prelude to The Shed,featuring free performances, talks and events, took place in a temporary structure designed by Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ Works.
A Stroll Through the Fun Palace, British architect Cedric Price’s 1961 project, developed with theater director Joan Littlewood, was presented in dynamic form by architects wheeling models and items from the project archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture on carts throughout the site, and interacting with curious visitors. A Stroll was originally presented at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale at the Swiss Pavilion, where it was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is also Senior Program Advisor at The Shed.
On May 1, the evening panel discussion centered on Price’s Fun Palace and its impact on The Shed. Obrist and Prelude co-programmer Dorothea von Hantelmann set the stage by explaining why they included this work in the roster, and how its presentation explores the exhibition form itself. They correlated the Fun Palace’s interdisciplinary nature—opera, visual art, theater, dance—with Artistic Director Alex Poots’s background at the Manchester International Festival, the Park Avenue Armory and now The Shed.
They were followed by Eleanor Bron, Cedric Price’s concubine (her preferred term for life partner), an actor best known for film roles in Help!, Alfie, Two for the Road, Bedazzled, and Women in Love, and Samantha Hardingham, interim director of the AA and author of Cedric Price Works, 1952–2003: A Forward-MindedRetrospective. They described the challenge for the self-described “anti-architect" to create a home for as many forms of fun in one spot as possible, and to open up science and culture to all. The Fun Palace, intended for the Olympics site in East London, was conceived as a permeable, moveable, gravity-defying open space without beginning or end, in contrast to the prevalent earthbound style of the times in Britain, Brutalism. It counted among is trustees Buckminster Fuller and violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and it nearly happened except for a drainage problem on the site.
In another connection to The Shed, in 1999, Price submitted a proposal for Phyllis Lambert’s Hudson Yards competition, the current site of The Shed. Titled ALung for Midtown Manhattan, Price was one of five finalists, who also included Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, Morphosis, Reiser + Umemoto, and winner Peter Eisenman. The jury consisted of Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki, Philip Johnson, Rafael Moneo, Joseph Rose (City Planning Commissioner), and Elizabeth Diller. Notably, Diller voted for Price’s entry, which proposed leaving the space open with “wind-blinkers” to encourage breezes from the river to waft over Manhattan.
Diller recounted the competition in the next panel, which also included David Rockwell and Kunlé Adeyemi. Diller and Rockwell discussed their approach to the design of The Shed: to be forever contemporary, flexible but not generic, scalable, indoor and outdoor, unbranded and entrepreneurial. They said their key architecture reference was the Fun Palace, which was an architecture of infrastructure. They also questioned why we need one more cultural institution, since New York City already boasts 12,000. Referring to the moveable portion of The Shed, Rockwell pointed out that many theaters are meant to be flexible (think Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall), which are rarely utilized because it’s too difficult or expensive. For him, another lesson was from his TED Theater in Vancouver, an annual pop-up meant to be “live.” Here, the architecture does not dictate what happens inside.
The evening was rounded out with Keller Easterling, an architect and Yale professor, who spoke on notions of theater in architectural spaces (in addition to being an architect, she has a background as a performance artist) and Caroline A. Jones, a professor at MIT Architecture, who found parallels in electronic technological modes of production in the art world. They commented that presenters on stage facing the audience was the antithesis of the future Shed.

In Manhattan, there are two things we keep seeing everywhere: WeWork and Bjarke Ingels. From its signature coworking office spaces to an elementary school, WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann seems intent on infiltrating every aspect of people’s lives. According to WeWork’s blog, the plan “starts with every space for every member and scales to every building in every city.”
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is also cropping up around NYC (quite literally as the BIG U will encircle downtown Manhattan) as well as VIA 57 West, Two World Trade, 40th Precinct Police Station, the Spiral at Hudson Yards, and the Eleventh.
With all of this in mind, it seems inevitable that the two would team up for dual domination: WeWork has hired Ingels as its first “chief architect.” Ingels will continue to lead his offices out of Copenhagen and London as he creates more WeWork spaces.
“WeWork was founded at the exact same time as when I had arrived to New York. In that short amount of time – the blink of an eye at the time scale of architecture–they have accomplished incredible things and they are committed to continuing their trajectory to places we can only imagine. WeWork’s commitment to community and culturally driven development is perfectly aligned with our active, social and environmental agendas. As WeWork takes on larger and more holistic urban and architectural challenges, I am very excited to contribute with my insights and ideas to extend their community-oriented vision to ground-up buildings and urban neighborhoods,” Ingels said in a statement.
His first task will be to transform the former Lord & Taylor building into WeWork’s new headquarters. He is also working on the aforementioned school, WeGrow. As Fast Company reported, Neumann and Ingels have a shared, confident vision:

“I [Neumann] said, ‘Give me your favorite building.’
“He [Ingels] said, ‘I don’t have one favorite building because of the design-by-committee situation. I get one or three amazing original ideas that I’ve been working on for a decade in a building, but there were seven other ideas that were not exactly mine.’
“I said, ‘I want all your best ideas in one building.’
“He said, ‘If someone actually allowed me to do it, I could design the perfect office building or perfect residential building.’
“I said, ‘Perfect, that’s a big word.’
“He said, ‘No one’s ever given me a shot.'”

Hudson Yards isn’t the only megaproject on Manhattan’s far west side. Developer Brookfield Propertieshas released a new set of renderings and a fly-through video of what the area will look like once its Manhattan West development is complete. Once complete, the seven-million-square-foot “neighborhood” will link Hudson Yards on the far west side with Penn Station’s renovated Moynihan Train Hall.
Hemmed between Ninth and Tenth Avenues and 31st to 33rd Streets, Manhattan West will hold offices, retail, hotels, and residential units, with most of the buildings featuring sleek glass facades.
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REX’s recent retrofit of 5 Manhattan West; the rising 69 stories of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s (SOM) One Manhattan West office tower; SLCE’s recently completed The Eugene, a 62-story residential tower and the tallest of its type in Midtown Manhattan; SOM’s Two Manhattan West, a 59-story office tower which recently filed DOB permits and the 13-story “The Loft” are all on track to finish construction by either 2019 or 2020. Fewer details have been released about the more mysterious Four Manhattan West, which will be a 30-story boutique hotel with condo units. A 60,000-square-foot public plaza designed by James Corner Field Operations and 200,000 square feet of ground floor shops and restaurants will round out the public amenities.
Now, Brookfield has released a flythrough of the project, starting at a revitalized Empire Station (the forthcoming rebrand of the new Penn Station complex) with stops along each of the campus’s towers. Watch the video below:
Brookfield has also created a VR walkthrough of the entire development, including interior views from each of the office towers, as well as street-level shots.
Construction on the $1.6 billion Moynihan Train Hall is ongoing, and it may be a number of years before the area comes into its own. That doesn’t seem to be a hurdle for Amazon (who are already renting space in 5 Manhattan West), and reps from the tech giant will soon visit New York to scout out prospective HQ2 office space on the far west side.

The sprint to finish the first phase of the Hudson Yards megaproject is on, as the Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group-designed 15 Hudson Yards (Ismael Leyva Architects is serving as the architect of record and handling the interiors) topped out today. The 917-foot-tall condo tower will be the first residential building to open in the new neighborhood, and if construction finishes at the end of 2018 as planned, then the first phase of the new neighborhood will be on track for its March 2019 opening.
The 285-unit 15 Hudson Yards is one of the last pieces of the project’s first phase, including the recently completed, bronzed stepwell Vessel nearby, and represents a culmination of five years of work at the site. Although the tower features a glass curtain wall similar to the other buildings on the site, 15 Hudson Yards gradually splits and rounds as it rises, resembling a set of conjoined smokestacks emerging from a square base. The LEED Gold-certified tower will also recycle stormwater, and use capture runoff to support the cooling systems.
Once completed, residents will have 40,000 square feet of amenity space, including a 75-foot-long swimming pool in a full “aquatics center,” a fitness club, golf lounge, wine storage and tasting room, and a co-working space for residents. The lucky buyers get to look down on The Shed, as 15 Hudson looms over the extendable cultural venue, also designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group.
As the first phase of the 28-acre, 18-million-foot mixed-use development winds to a close, speculation is heating up over who developers Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group will tap to design the largely residential second phase of Hudson Yards. As AN reported earlier this month, architects Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry are both in the running to design residential towers on the western half of the site. Hudson Yards will contain about 4,000 residential units once it’s fully complete in 2024.
Check out a time-lapse video of 15 Hudson’s construction below.
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Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and Los-Angeles-based Frank Gehry have been chosen to design an undetermined number of residential towers for phase II of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards megaproject, reports the Wall Street Journal. According to “a person familiar with the matter,” the two sometimes-controversial architects were among a crop of designers chosen by the project’s co-developers, Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group.
As the first phase of Hudson Yards, development on the eastern half of the 28-acre site, has been racing towards the 2019 finish line, Related and Oxford have begun looking ahead to the project’s residential western portion.
Phase one saw the rise of Thomas Heatherwick’s pinecone-shaped Vessel, the eventual completion of four surrounding office buildings, a subway extension on the 7 line, and the High Line-straddling cultural Shed. The second phase will see the rise of 4 million square feet of residential space spread out across seven towers, and another 2 million square feet of office space. The western portion of the site is bounded by the High Line to the west, and is where the elevated park dips to street level. Phase II will likely wrap up by 2024, the projected deadline for the entire project.
Handing the reins over to Calatrava and Gehry is an interesting choice by Related and Oxford, as neither architect has realized many residential projects in New York City. While the billowing metal façade of 8 Spruce Street (aka New York by Gehry) is a familiar site on the skyline, Calatrava is most well known in New York for the soaring curves of the Oculus transportation hub. Gehry hasn't shied away from his tepid opinion of the High Line, saying "The High Line is a rusty rail bridge and they put some plants on it." Whatever flair either architect brings to the project will also need to fit within the context of the Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed master plan for the site.
AN has reached out to the relevant parties for confirmation and will update this post when more information becomes available.

Eager to combat a serious housing shortage in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood, State Senator Simcha Felder (D- Southern Brooklyn) announced Tuesday that the MTA would be opening a Request for Proposals (RFP) for developing a 3.8-acre stretch of rail bed that runs through the area. Decking over the site and building residences, similar to what’s happened in Hudson Yards and proposed for Sunnyside Yards, could bring thousands of units to an area of south Brooklyn that’s grown rapidly in recent years.
The Long Island Railroad (LIRR) Bay Ridge Branch section cuts from 61st Street between Fort Hamilton Parkway, and 8th Avenue, and is seldom used apart from the freight trains that might pass through once or twice a day. Looking to create a long-term revenue stream from the site, the MTA released their RFP for developing the site’s airspace, at least 22 feet over the rail bed, on Thursday, available here.
Calling for private developers to apply, the RFP demands that teams would not only be responsible for the architectural aspect of the residential buildings on the site, both market-rate and affordable, but also retail and office space as well as parking lots.
Additionally, any scheme has to leave the rail track in place, and engineering solutions must be included for decking over a gap that ranges from 82 -feet wide in some places to 118 feet in others. This is no easy feat, especially as utilities must also be supplied to the site and would presumably run through the decking; it’s no wonder that the MTA is requiring the entire project to be privately financed. The cost of decking over the much larger, 180-acre Sunnyside Yards has been projected to cost up to $19 billion for similar reasons, though no cost estimates have been released for this stretch of the LIRR yet.
The fight to build over this stretch of tracks has been going on for years, with local community groups only recently embracing the plan. Senator Felder stressed that any new construction would have to fit the character of the surrounding neighborhoods.
“The vision is to create residential development that is consistent with the character of the neighborhood,” said Felder. “The location of this project presents a significant opportunity to create additional housing units on a gigantic parcel of land that covers a few city blocks.”
Interested applicants have until April 27th, 2018, to submit a proposal.

Thomas Heatherwick’s $150 million Vessel sculpture has topped out only eight months after beginning construction. The freestanding staircase is set to anchor phase one of the Hudson Yards megaproject when it opens in 2019, when the five-acre public plaza where Vessel sits, opens to the public.
The 150-foot tall, bronzed-steel and concrete Vessel is designed to react to its surroundings in both material and function. Containing over 2,400 steps, 80 landings and 154 flights of stairs, the sculpture gradually widens out from a 50-foot base to a 150-feet diameter at the top, and will offer visitors unobstructed views of the surrounding Hudson Yards neighborhood and the other side of the Hudson River.
Fabrication on Vessel began in January, with the individual pieces made in Italy and shipped to the site from Port of Newark in New Jersey across the Hudson River. A time-lapse video of the sculpture's construction provided by Hudson Yards developer Related Companies can be found below.
In a statement, the London-based Heatherwick said the following about the project: “Vessel is one of the most complex pieces of steelwork ever made. Today we are marking the exciting moment when the last of the enormous 75 pre-fabricated pieces which traveled all the way from Italy to Manhattan, has been assembled ahead of schedule and with astonishing geometric accuracy.”
The climbable sculpture has been compared to a pinecone, a beehive, and countless other forms, while critics have questioned everything from the sculpture’s ADA compliance to the implications of running privately-funded public art spaces.
Although the sculpture is only waiting for its cladding, railings, and lighting, Vessel won’t open to the public until early 2019. As part of phase one of Hudson Yards’ development, the surrounding construction on the landscaped plaza and nearby supertalls have necessitated that everything opens at the same time. Once that happens, visitors will be able to move from one west side attraction, the High Line, straight to Heatherwick’s soaring atrium.